


onyx is a soothing stone

by joeri



Series: commissions [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Trans Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-07 18:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21462892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joeri/pseuds/joeri
Summary: Sylvain creaks the door ajar before Felix can form the fist to knock. His neon energies, red like the Kaffir Lillies that bloom in late winter beside the Gautier estate, come to wilt, lean away from the sun; he takes in the state of Felix’s battle accoutrements, ripped to rags and bathed in blood.Sylvain wrenches him into the doorway and Felix does not fight it.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Series: commissions [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1547167
Comments: 6
Kudos: 158





	onyx is a soothing stone

**Author's Note:**

> The words used for Felix's body are to the comfort of the requester. This piece refers to Felix's chest as breasts and at one point refers to his genitals as lips. Every other mention of his body is androgynous/ambiguous. If these terms are triggering to your dysphoria, please take care.

Garreg Mach’s a dark, wintry wasteland when Felix leaves for battle. It’s a bright arctic sun come morning and the breeze upon his skin is every bit as frostbitten as it is lively, every bit of a pointless breeze as it is a burning message to his finer senses: he’s alive to feel it, and so he’s alive to be loved.

Their conversation from this morning plays back and forth through Felix’s brain like a royal bard stuck on the same song, whistling the same tune for their criminal king until the soldiers come home. Maybe Sylvain hadn’t given thought to the concept of losing his love, of finding out he’s been gutted through, gouged with arrows as though he’d fallen into a cactus garden from the highest Adrestian cliff edge. Maybe Sylvain had nothing but gold and faith inside him, full of treasures and immeasurable light, but Felix was not the same.

Just as surely as he’d lost his brother, Felix had to be sure he would follow, whether his hypocrite mouth spat it up or not. It’s a walk of shame every morning the sun comes, every day that he still wakes, every battle he survives—he does not have the same optimism in himself. Not like he’d ever express this. No point in it. The march to Sylvain’s quarters is the same thousand and forty-four steps no matter the feeling.

_“I’ve got something for you when you come home,”_ he’d said, fairly cryptically, an inadvertent stoking of those fires in Felix, like a sign that something particularly unfair was about to transpire.

The scent of the cold is a fierce iron as he hobbles through. This morning is a bloody blue, his uniform torn to shreds and sticky with the ichor of a few different men. It could be any number of Adrestian soldiers stained across his cheek just as much as it could be his own, seeping from the twice elixir’d wounds that can’t seem to stop running themselves like rivers. At one point he’d been accompanied by Mercedes, her healing touch helping to patch up what bits of flesh had rejected prior magics. Flaying his ribs open on a former friend’s axe had not been on his itinerary for the night. The blade came for his blood all the same, eager to let it out.

It’s a reasonable lie to tell when Felix is nothing more than feet from Sylvain’s dorm room, that with all due respect, Sylvain should see the other guys, their fallen friends and hold them further in his thoughts than the couple of wounds Felix has taken in the chest tonight. It’s a lie he won’t tell, because really, Felix Fraldarius doesn’t sugarcoat and doesn’t try to say that war is a thing it isn’t. It’s a place where men go to die thinking there’s any glory to be found in it. To him, _that’s_ the lie. To Felix, he won’t fool himself by thinking there’d be any tribute in one more Fraldarius dying for Dimitri Blaiddyd’s cause.

Still, the longer he spends in Sylvain’s room, the more he begins wishing with all his heart that it won’t transpire all the same. Sylvain creaks the door ajar before Felix can form the fist to knock. His neon energies, red like the Kaffir Lillies that bloom in late winter beside the Gautier estate, come to wilt, lean away from the sun; he takes in the state of Felix’s battle accoutrements, ripped to rags and bathed in blood.

Sylvain wrenches him into the doorway and Felix does not fight it. A bath then, Sylvain decides to run, and he helps peel away the film of drenched cotton glued to Felix’s ribs—the chilly blood’s nearly viscous in the single digit degree weather. Layer after layer is discarded until Felix stands on display. It’s not the first time Sylvain’s beheld his body with such care, and if he’s got anything to say about it, as Felix is sure he does, it will fail to be last. Even as ugly thoughts comb themselves through the nest of Felix’s mind and pray they’ll find a home to roost in, Felix takes comfort in at least the presence Sylvain has in his life.

The hands taking to his wound and soaping it up are a boon, too. They’re so much bigger than his own and press pleasantly hard. Felix lets him do his work.

“Who was it?” Sylvain says and the tension does not fade with the question, even as Sylvain’s thumbs come to dig into Felix’s trapezius muscles. Those are the ones connecting the shoulder and neck. He’s pulled them enough times to remember the name of what he’s abusing. Sylvain treats them better. Sylvain kisses them softly.

“No one you know,” Felix breathes. “No one _we_ know.” Leaning back up against Sylvain’s pillowy chest, suds circling their skin like the embroidered edge of a doily, Felix settles in the tub against his lover.

Sylvain smooths the pad of his fingers across the many scars aching from Felix’s skin, across the fearfully made wound and soon to the small, curvature of his breasts. They massage and squeeze, and Sylvain’s words are warm at the conch of his ear: “I’m glad that you’re safe.”

Nodding in simple, exhausted agreement, Felix dips his head back into Sylvain. He grunts in discomfort as Sylvain sidles the wash rag up against his gash, scrubbing as weakly as he can without tearing it back open. It stings and he writhes.

“Calm yourself,” Felix bites. “Don’t open me back up.”

In a most thoughtful voice, dripping in sincerity, “I can’t just… let you get infected,” says Sylvain. He wrings the washing cloth out and leaves it to hang upon the side of the bathtub; in between sucking fervent kisses into the side of Felix’s neck, he goes on to murmur, “I need you alive, Fe.”

Felix says, “so do I.”

In spite of his curt tongue, Felix hearkens all the same to the care in Sylvain’s cautious cadence. Sylvain’s lively mouth upon his throat has Felix wriggling in the water, breath catching as Sylvain’s thick fingers linger along his chest, tracing lines and drawing patterns until Felix is puffing impatiently in his grasp. A fire threads up through Felix, rising from far between his legs. Sylvain snakes his fingernails down Felix’s stomach.

“I don’t want to wait anymore,” croons Sylvain, hands to each of Felix’s bony hips. It isn’t until they slip backward to grope and grab, Sylvain filling his palms full of Felix’s rear that Felix finds himself feeling teased. Sylvain sucks and _bites_ a couple of big red stamps straight into the skin of his carotid, fingers nimbly clambering for the fleshy underneath of Felix’s thighs to grab hold of and pull apart, like separating the East from the West. His muscles clench up with desire.

_Guess Sylvain really missed him._

Felix rides the inhale of a great big breath as Sylvain takes to lifting Felix up from behind, strong knuckles curled in at the bends of his knees until Felix is gathered up on his lap. Like clockwork, his hands scrabble for the sides of the tub—“_Sylvain!_”

Slippery fingers fighting for purchase against the cast-iron edge of the basin, Felix whines as Sylvain lowers him back down and he can sense the throb of Sylvain’s cock against his lips below the water. Really, can’t even preserve himself until they’re finished bathing, Felix guesses, not actually in a complaint so much as a harmless jeer. His lower back still writhes in anticipation anyways.

_Take me_, Felix finds himself wishing wordlessly with abandon. Sylvain’s nails dig into his thighs, his cock sinking with a relative ease inside of Felix. The sudden swallowing pressure has them both groaning out, Felix’s toes curling up, his neck craning back, his throat misremembering how to hold his breaths in and then Sylvain says softly, “I don’t wanna wait to marry you.”

Oh, Goddess is _that_ what he was talking about? Felix can hardly fortune a reply before Sylvain’s rocking up into him. Some bathwater crashes over the curved edge. The splash of the water against the tile resembles something his brain is doing now that the words have sunk in. Sylvain embeds his teeth into his shoulder, a marked change from the kisses before. Felix lets it all happen, his body going wonderfully sawdust dollesque in his lover’s grip. All the while his body shakes. His walls tighten about Sylvain’s cock. Felix tries to catch his breath.

“You’re so impatient,” Felix grouses ragelessly, not a hint of ire behind it when he growls and bickers back against it. “We’re at _war_,” and it’s not a joke when he says it, and Sylvain doesn’t seem to think it’s one by the way that he shifts a palm to the gash in Felix’s ribs.

For the griping, Felix definitely replaces Sylvain’s grip on one thigh, holding him open in a sudden, perfunctory gesture that he can’t even be embarrassed by. Not when Sylvain is spearing him so perfectly down the middle, sliding inside deeper and stretching him so wide Felix almost swears he can feel it in his chest.

“You could’ve died,” says Sylvain, not the best time for this kind of talk but honest all the same—honest the way that Felix likes it. “I don’t want to lose this.”

And forgive Sylvain for the timing, as he fucks up hard into Felix and Felix has to wonder if by _this_ all he means is having a consistent stress reliever. It passes his mind in a flurry and Felix knows for all of Sylvain’s past behaviors, this is an arrangement they’ve been set on for as long as the war has been raging. These are the things Felix dreamt of. These are the things that you say you can’t do when you’re in school and you’re a teen and you’re really a _child_ but you’re already being taught how to kill and how to properly die. Felix couldn’t want this.

But they’re wrapped up in one another’s grip. Felix pitches a sound forth that is meant to be a sentence or some words. Something to answer him. Instead, Sylvain’s reaching a hand through the water, fingertips lapping up against where their bodies meet. His touch is too, too gentle for Felix to handle without melting, without feeling a sickness twist in his gut at the sheer volume of love behind the gesture. Sylvain touches him with care. Sylvain touches him like he might break, and so he unravels, crying out as though he’s being split apart.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Sylvain adjusts.

“Sylvain,” pants up Felix, his inhales coming faster and faster.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in you,” he says, pausing to grunt, pausing to get a former grip on Felix’s hips, feeling them rut and arch against him with every moment that passes. “I just want to know you’re mine—”

“_Sylvain_,” he chokes out.

“I want to steal you from your house, your name, we can make our own.”

Felix doesn’t know what Sylvain is saying. So much is coming out all at once, filling his head like cotton and numbing his senses. All Felix knows is that somehow he’s not any farther from coming. This shoddy split second proposal only has Felix wearing down, sinking deeper into the overwhelming force that Sylvain’s been in his life since they were six and nine. Sylvain wanted to marry him too, then. Felix told him yes.

How could Felix tell him anything but yes?

“I want you like this every day, every night, every moment I can have you—you’re so beautiful, so handsome and so perfect and so good…”

The words evaporate. Felix’s body convulses, his face corkscrewing with shattering pleasure as Sylvain mutters these words into his neck, into his ear, all while kissing and licking every inch his mouth can reach. The water splashing is loud. Felix’s thumbs and fingers knead into the basin. Sylvain cradles him close. Sylvain fucks him _hard_ and Felix can’t pretend to care about whether his wound reopens. It surely won’t. Sylvain’s body is nothing but healing to him, nothing but feast in a time of famine and nothing but a light in a world of darkness.

Sylvain’s fingers circle quick, massaging into Felix the way he’s learned these past few years. Every spot is mapped out. Every plane of Felix’s body is known, marked, _loved._

“Do you wanna marry me?” puffs Sylvain, his voice wavering as his own pleasure undoubtedly starts to crown; his thrusting turns erratic. “Do you wan—”

And Felix says, “I do,” his body folding in on itself with the pressure building between them. “I do, _I do_,” he interrupts, he repeats as he spasms, as he crumbles under the throb of Sylvain finishing inside.

Bodies writhing and stuttering into one another, Felix tosses his arms above his head to grab for Sylvain, to snag his hair and head and neck and _hold_ him tight and near and oh god—Felix can only see the dark on the other side of his eyes until Sylvain’s ushering him down from the top, rubbing him down and pulling out of him.

Felix is bleary in the eyes and boneless when Sylvain plucks his body from the water. He’s ashiver in all of his limbs from where the bathwater ran cold—wrinkled at the toes and fingers where he soaked in Sylvain’s love. Sylvain envelops him in the towel and kisses him twice. The drip from Felix’s lips finds itself winding down the angles of Sylvain’s body. Like this, they’re connected now and Sylvain pulls Felix to the bed where a litter of clothes lay. Loose around the shoulders, the night blouse threatens to slip from Felix’s much scrawnier form. Sylvain’s arms around his waist, fingers in his stomach serve to make him feel complete when their frames fit together just right on the bed they both share.

Then Sylvain departs, leans away just long enough for Felix to miss him as he treks across the room. Felix yanks the blankets up high, his body a dimmer, colder thing without Sylvain’s to warm it. It’s far from a Summer’s night. Linking face to neck and hand to hand, Sylvain climbs back inside with a shiny silver thing in his fist. It’s got three rocks sitting in the center, ruby and sapphire and onyx. Felix says, “this is not your usual engagement ring,” not in distaste. It bucks tradition, and so Felix finds himself threading his ring finger through it before Sylvain can even answer.

“It’s an arrangement no one will like,” he answers, and Felix had thought the onyx was merely Sylvain’s love of black as a fashion statement.

With Sylvain nuzzled into his shoulder, their hands overlapping as Felix splays his fingers out, admiring the ring, Felix smiles vengefully. “They don’t have to like it,” he says with power. “I like it, and I like you.”


End file.
